Vow Keeping

One of the fatal weaknesses of modern Christians who profess to hold to orthodoxy is that we have not demonstrated, to a watching world, a radical commitment to honor our marital vows through thick and thin. We allow the slightest things, even variations in our feelings and personal emotional states, to serve as excuses to walk away from our marriages and, when we deem it necessary, our children. Leaving our spouses to find greener pastures appears to be about as common among professing Christians as everyone else. (I can back this up with a lot of hard data, but I don’t wish to focus on statistics here! See my book Christian Marriage.) 

I am not talking about people divorcing due to such causes as infidelity, serious abuse, abandonment, their spouses committing serious crime, and so on. I am talking about folk ditching their vows in order to pursue self-fulfillment, personal happiness, elsewhere. Most divorces are not in marriages that are demonstrably riddled with serious conflict and problems (again, see my book and also this article), but for “soft” reasons like this.

High divorce rates reflect a highly individualized, “therapeutic” view of matrimony, one that we also see in related areas such as rising cohabitation rates which are tied to declining marriage rates. That is, marriage is seen as being just one relationship choice among many to be abandoned or rejected if it fails to deliver personal happiness or fulfillment, vows or not, children or not. Not surprisingly, the more Americans look to marriage as just another “voluntary committed relationship” to deliver subjective and emotional benefits on their own terms, the less it is able to actually deliver these desired “goods” for them.  As Robert Bellah et al pointed out in the 1985 social science classic Habits of the Heart:

‘Finding oneself’ is not something one does alone. The quest for personal growth and self-fulfillment is supposed to lead one into relationships with others, and most important among them are love and marriage. But the more love and marriage are seen as sources of rich psychic satisfactions, it would seem, the less firmly they are anchored in an objective pattern of roles and social institutions. Where spontaneous interpersonal intimacy is the ideal, as is increasingly the case, formal role expectations and obligations may be viewed negatively, as likely to inhibit such intimacy. If love and marriage are seen primarily in terms of psychological gratification, they may fail to fulfill their older social function of providing people with stable, committed relationships that tie them into the larger society. (P. 85)

Love and commitment, it appears, are desirable but not easy. For in addition to believing in love, we Americans believe in the self. Indeed…there are few criteria for action outside the self. The love that must hold us together is rooted in the vicissitudes of our subjectivity. (P. 90)

Every trend that Robert Bellah and his co-authors noted in Habits of the Heart regarding love and marriage has accelerated in the thirty-five plus years since it was first published. At that time the authors noted that the evangelicals were one of the few remaining groups consciously and intentionally bucking the therapeutic view of marriage. Since then, it too has increasingly succumbed to the siren call of rooting marriage in egoism, rather than seeing it as love realized in action within institutionalized and publicly affirmed solemn commitments. Ironically, it is marital love of this latter, more durable sort that is actually able to deliver personal meaning and happiness better than marriages in which one or both partners are primarily searching for self-fulfillment in the union, precisely because this older, more enduring approach to marital love is motivated by things far larger, better, more important, beautiful, and profound than self-gratification. This latter approach also happens to be consistent with the entire Christian understanding of what love truly is and means, and what marriage truly is and is for.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’ advice was golden: “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” We can apply that to marriage. When we use matrimony mainly as a means for personal happiness, we will typically not get that in the long run, and we will inflict unhappiness on others (our spouse, our children, and so on) to boot. But if we pursue God’s purposes for marriage and our spouse’s (and children’s) highest good more than our own personal gratification, we will find—almost magically—that our own happiness is enhanced. Better than that, we will discover deep purpose and meaning in our marriages.

It is no wonder that increasingly, millennials and beyond are viewing marriage as unnecessarily restrictive, unnecessary to having a fulfilling life generally, and even unnecessary to having and raising children. Given their view of marriage and what it is for, and the no-fault ways it can be ended, exactly how is modern marriage different from cohabitation, except for being a bit harder to escape for married people who have decided that their union aren’t working for them?

 Marriage as a disposable consumer good?  It was not always so. As recently as the time when many Baby Boomers like me were born, believers and unbelievers alike accepted the idea that marriage was something larger than the individuals within it and their personal gratification. In ideals, culturally admired heroes, and often in fact, the idea that simply keeping one’s word, including one’s marital vows, could be very hard, but should never-the-less be done, was widely held. It was generally understood that marriage involved men taking on the obligations of men, and women those of women, and both willingly sacrificing themselves for each other, the welfare of their children, and the institution of marriage. It was also widely understood that this commitment at the marital and familial levels fostered good in our communities, schools, churches, and nation. We saw this kind of commitment all around us too. In my childhood, even in the liberal and cosmopolitan suburbs of Washington, D.C., and with a pretty robust circle of friends and acquaintances, I had exactly one personal friend whose parents were divorced. Yet few of them were from seriously religious families.

 Are we surprised that we are now living in a time in which loneliness and isolation are now widely considered to be epidemic, even sparking warnings from our Surgeon General? Or that we increasingly learn that particularly young men, burned out from dating apps in which many seem to never measure up to the expectations of those of the opposite sex seeking “relationships,” are abandoning the hope of the latter altogether, can’t recall the last time they were on a real date, and are increasingly finding comfort in pornography and online or even robotic companions?

We serious Christians and our supposedly out-of-date, increasingly even culturally offensive, approach to marriage, sex, and children have so much more to offer than, sadly, many of us want to model or personally live out. Of course, this starts not with our approach to marriage, sex, and children, but with our turning to Christ as our only hope and source of meaning first, and embracing all that He teaches us, by His grace, including His radical teachings on love, sex, and marriage. Yet our marriages and families, lived out in increasingly radical disjuncture from those of our declining culture, will often be what attracts people to inquire after the hope and ultimate loyalties we have that motivates our radical commitment to keeping our vows, including our marital vows. As Scriptures repeatedly teach us, marriage points to and embodies deep spiritual realities of the relationship of Christ to His people, which reaches a crescendo in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation. By living faithfully in our marriages, we are drawing and pointing people to Christ, and to His Gospel.

The authentic identity for a true Christian can only be found in self-sacrificing service to the Lord Jesus Christ in obedience to the Word of God which He is also identified with and affirms as being the essence of (John 1:1-5). This includes keeping our public vows to our spouses and, by extension, our children. Not barely or minimally or legalistically but with grace, joy, perseverance, and a full heart.

Years ago, my pastor in Texas gave me a book of sermons by a fellow that I had heard of but was not personally familiar with, named B.B. Warfield. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921), the famous “Old Princeton” Seminary professor and minister, had quite a pedigree: his uncle was a former U.S. Vice President and Confederate general, his father a U.S. Senator and Attorney General, his brother a college president. This set of sermons my pastor gave me is called Faith and Life. It is a collection of sermons that he preached to Princeton seminary students on Sunday afternoons. Every single one of these sermons was theologically rich but practical and inspiring. Dr. Warfield was the quintessential Renaissance genius, but the warmth of his heart was incredible. After reading a few of these sermons I decided that this is a man I wanted to know more about, to see what B.B. Warfield the man was all about. And here is one of the things I read about (sometimes exaggerated in some accounts, but even in recent, carefully checked biography still inspiring and convicting).

In 1876, Benjamin Warfield got married. He and his wife Annie took a honeymoon to Europe. They were in the mountains hiking and were caught in a severe lightning storm. If you have ever been out in one of those, you know what they are like. Something happened to her that day, no one appears to be certain exactly what, but it appears to have led to a nervous disorder. She progressively got worse over time, eventually becoming an invalid. Though many accounts appear to have overstated the speed of the onset, and severity, of her disability, there appears to be little doubt that she required a lot of ongoing care that increased over time especially by the 1890’s, and that her husband lovingly cared for her until her death in 1915, then he died about five years later. They were never able to have children. Caring for her certainly meant limiting his engagements elsewhere (a tough thing for a world-famous Princeton theologian), especially in their later years. Interestingly, this appears to have increased his scholarly productivity.

People used to comment that B.B. Warfield was called “the Lion of Princeton” and “the last of the great Princeton theologians.” Dr. Gresham Machen, no slouch himself in the defense of orthodox Protestantism, said “When B.B. Warfield died, old Princeton died”. Some people were afraid of him. When he would go into a meeting and begin to attack heresy, his opponents had to hold onto their hats, because he was going to win. He hated to see professing Christians corrupting the church.

Imagine his students observing his care, devotion, and commitment to his wife and his marriage, living out the tenets of the Westminster Confession of Faith that he loved and defended so ably, including its categorical call to marital commitment and endurance in Chapter 24 section 6, and the reminder that the purposes of marriage include the “mutual help of husband and wife” in section 2 of that same chapter. We know that the quality of Warfield’s marriage had a profound impression on not only Machen but his famous student O.T Allis.

Warfield would be someone with real “street cred” when it comes to faithfully applying Biblical teaching on marital commitment, to use the modern slang. He would certainly not agree with Christians discarding their marriages for any reasons except the kind of grave ones laid out in the above Confession. Warfield’s life would also give his faithful Biblical teaching authenticity. Nobody could say that B.B. Warfield was not committed to the institution of marriage and that he was not willing to give up personal pleasure if that is what it took to maintain his vows. Is this characteristic of the church today?  It should be.

In contemplating this, and in closing, I will say that when I need examples of marital commitment, tenderness, fidelity, and self-sacrificing love I don’t need to only think of well-known Christians far away in status, space, and time like B.B. Warfield. I have had the privilege of knowing more than a few people, including some I have profound theological and political differences with, who inspire me with the love they have given their spouses, and continue to sacrificially serve their spouses when many others in our throw-away, consumer culture would have given up. I have seen, and been inspired by, this across decades of my Christian experience. Marriages that have withstood the overdose deaths or suicides of sons or daughters, spouses who have remained tender and faithful in the face of the complete disability of their partner through various forms of profound, chronic, and terribly disruptive mental and physical disability, permanent emotional and sexual rejection, and more. Yet, like Jesus to His Bride the Church, to His people, to us—they remained faithful. May that be said of us, lesser, married saints also.